Rethinking the Global Response to Public Health Emergencies

Members of the Presidential Commission on the Study of Bioethical Issues (Bioethics Commission) are considering possible recommendations for future engagements in public health emergencies, including ethical approaches to conducting research in affected countries even in the midst of a crisis.

Yesterday’s deliberations touched on a wide range of issues generated by the ongoing Ebola epidemic in western Africa, from the ethics of using placebos in clinical trials, to the stigmatization of members of western African communities and health care workers who tended to the sick, to the need to improve the response to future outbreaks.

Commission members heard from a wide variety of speakers, including current and former government officials; leading experts in infectious disease, ethics, and global health; and people who belong to and work with communities both in western Africa and the U.S. who have been profoundly affected by the epidemic.

The day closed with a roundtable discussion at which Amy Gutmann, Ph.D., Chair of the Bioethics Commission, posed a simple question: “If there was one thing you think could be improved moving forward in the U.S. response to public health crises like Ebola, what would it be?”

The following are highlights from the panel’s recommendations:

“Throughout this whole outbreak…I always thought: wouldn’t it be nice to have an empowered and independent Surgeon General who could have spoken to the public in a clear, concise way. Somebody who was not micromanaged by the White House or other agencies could have been a game-changer.”– Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute

“At the end of the day you can have the best public health system, but you have to build it on the backs of an educated community…As part of the (Ebola) crisis we are facing now, there are about five million kids across three countries who are in danger of missing a whole year of school and that has not been factored into most of the response we have seen.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.